Modern businesses and industries rely heavily on the creation, storage and transportation of digital documents and other kinds of digital files as a primary means of communication, information storage, and documentation. In many cases, the digital documents and files contain proprietary and/or confidential material. It is therefore important to assign a distribution policy to each document that is distributed.
Enforcing the distribution policy for a given digital content within the perimeter of assigner of the policy can be accomplished, e.g., using the methods described in PCT application number IL02/00037. However, once the digital content was transferred to the perimeter of another organization, the situation becomes more complicated. In particular, the policy originally assigned to the content by the source organization may contradict or interfere with the organizational policy of the recipient organization.
Another important aspect of the problem is assurance that the policy assigned by the source organization has indeed been applied in the receiving organization with respect to the distributed content.
Prior art is based on cumbersome manual solutions to the problem or relies on automatic receipts. In many cases, automatic receipts contradict the receiving organization policy, and therefore maybe blocked, rendering receipt-based tracking useless.
There is thus a recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a method and system that allows assurance of compliance with a distribution policy of digital items, which overcomes the drawbacks of current methods as described above.